Category Archives: Sweden

Tu bi år något tu bi

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To be or not to be
(or what is Sweden’s suicide rate, once and for all?)
 
Here is a loose translation of what I just wrote in Swedish: I couldn’t hack it as Sweden’s best weblog, so I’ve decided to aim for notoriety at any cost — hence my attempt at Sweden’s worst weblog, which should be easily achieved by blogging in Swedish.
 
I have no idea why you would want to read this uncorrected text. My Swedish teacher only reads it because I pay her; and I can’t afford to pay you all to read it.
 
For my first post in Swedish I thought I’d find out if Swedes really like to commit suicide. It’s a persistent meme, as Jonas recently showed on his blog. Last year I blogged a WHO report that covered suicide, and used it to compare US/Canada and western European suicide levels: They were about the same, 10.5 per 100,000 people per year for western Europe and 10.6 per 100k for the US/Canada. What amazed me then is that suicide rates are much higher than murder rates, with the difference most evident in Europe.
 
This time, I’ve gone looking for individual country statistics. Once again, a closer look at statistics gives me numbers that don’t add up. In this case, the individual components seem to be higher than the regional aggregates I used last year. The US, for example, has a suicide rate of 13.9/100k, and Canada’s is 15.0/100k. Possibly, this discrepancy is due to estimates and projections being made for the regional numbers.
 
In any case, how does Sweden perform compared to the rest of the world?
 
[See list]
 
You can check out more countries on p.186 of the PDF. Clearly, Sweden’s suicide rate is nothing special. Catholic countries tend to have lower suicide rates, eastern European countries tend to have higher ones.
 
If one needs ammunition against the likes of Rush Limbaugh however, here is a useful factoid: Swedish males commit suicide at a lower rate than American males (22.9 vs 23.2). It’s the Swedish women who shuffle off this mortal coil faster than American women (9.2 vs 5.3), proving that even in suicide Sweden is staunchly egalitarian.Eftersom det blev för svart att bli Sveriges bäste webblogg, kom jag på att skriver Sveriges sämsta webblogg. Detta projekt bör vara jätte lätt för mig, om jag skriver på svenska.

Jag vet inte varför du skulle vilja läsa den här texten. Min lärare har inte ännu korrigerat det. Hon läser det bara eftersom jag betala henne; jag orkar inte betala allt som kommer hit till min webblogg.

För den här första inläggen på svenska hade jag idéen att undersöka om det är sant att Svenskar tycker om att begå självmord. Det verkar vara en strong kliché om Sverige, som Jonas på Blind Höna har redan vist. Jag kom ihåg en rapport från den World Health Organization kallad World Report on Violence and Health. Jag hade redan bloggad det förre aret, och jag hade jämfört självmordtal mellan USA/Canada och väst Europa. Nivåerna var nästan samma: 10.5 per 100,000 personer begett självmord varje ar i väst Europa, och 10.6 i USA/Canada. Det är intressant att i väst Europa självmordtal är mycket högre än det mordtal. Det hade jag inte förmodat.

Men nu har jag hittad informationen om individuella länder [PDF]. Vad är lite konstigt är att de här data komponenter inte stämmer överens med de regionala summorna. Till exempel, USA här hade ett självmordtal av 13.9/100k och Canada 15.0/100k. Kanske de regionale numren[PDF] var uppskattningar (numren av individuella länder var för specifika år). Kanske de var fel. Men Jämfört resten av värld, hur presterar Sverige i den här listan?

Sverige: 15.9 (1996)

USA: 13.9 (1998)

Argentina: 8.7 (1996)

Australien: 17.9 (1998)

Belarus: 41.5 (1999)

Belgien: 24.0 (1995)

Cuba: 23.0 (1997)

Danmark: 18.4 (1996)

Finland: 28.4 (1998)

Frankrike: 20.0 (1998)

Tyskland: 14.3 (1999)

Holland: 11.0 (1999)

Ungern: 36.1 (1999)

Norge: 14.6 (1997)

Ryskland: 43.1 (1998)

Storbritannien: 9.8 (1999)

Spanien 8.7 (1998)

Schweiz: 22.5 (1996)

Du kan kolla själv flera länder på PDFen, sidan 186. Vi kan konkludera att Sveriges självmordtal är ingenting speciellt. Katolska länder verkar ha färre självmördar, och öst europeiska länder flera.

Om man behöver ammunition mot argument från Rush Limbaugh et al, kan man använda detta faktum: Färre Svenska män begår självmord än Amerikanska män (22.9 vs 23.2). Det är Svenska kvinnor som begår mer självmord än Amerikanska kvinnor (9.2 vs 5.3), som bevisa att även med självmord är Svenskaren jämlikhetsträvande. (Jonas, kanske “radikalfeministen” Amy på West Wing vet mer än vi förmådde:-)

(Om du har en plötslig längtan om att korrigera något här ovan, det får du.)

Animal rights vs human rights (vs common sense)

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A friend mentioned last week that kosher butchers are illegal in Sweden. I thought to myself, that can’t be right, that would be, well, not kosher. It turns out I didn’t have the whole story: the traditional forms of both kosher and halal slaughter (where the animals are not pre-stunned) are banned here, on the grounds that they constitute cruelty to animals.

Two interesting papers on the web helped me to flesh out the details: This paper on immigration and multiculturalism in Sweden identifies animal rights considerations as the cause for the prohibition:

Consider the issue of kosher and halal slaughter. These forms of religious slaughter are prohibited in Sweden, as they require that an animal be conscious up until the point of slaughter. This is considered inhumane in Scandinavia, where it is required that an animal be anesthetized before slaughter. This difference of opinion regarding the most appropriate method of preparing an animal for human consumption illustrates the most basic type of cultural conflict that can be expected.
 
In Britain this conflict was resolved by allowing religious slaughter to provide for those religious groups requiring it, while in Sweden, Orthodox rabbis have agreed that animals stunned before slaughter still meet with the spirit of the kosher requirements. Nonetheless, in practice, much kosher meat is imported from abroad.

A paper on the legal status of Islamic minorities in Sweden [PDF, 252K], presented at a migration research conference this summer, looks more broadly at the state’s involvement:

Halal slaughter without pre-stunning the animal is not permitted, but it is legal to import halal slaughtered meat from other countries. If pre-stunning is accepted (and most Muslim public voices in Sweden seem to accept it), halal slaughter is legal, and during the autumn of 2001 the first all Islamic slaughtering house was opened. Before that (and still) Muslim butchers have slaughtered according to halal laws (with pre-stunning) in other slaughtering houses. Poultry is an exception to the rule; it has always been legal to slaughter poultry without pre-stunningWhy do chickens get such a raw deal? Does this reflect our own cultural disdain for chickens? (And going way off topic, what exactly is the difference between a pig and a dog when it comes to choosing which to eat?).
 
During the 1990’s, two official reports on ritual slaughter (both Jewish and Muslim) were made pointing in different directions. The first one, Slakt av obedövade djur (Slaughter of not stunned animals, 1992) was conducted by Jordbruksverket (Swedish Board of Agriculture), generally in charge of questions related to slaughter. This report has been criticised for not considering the value of religious plurality and liberty of religion. The second one was conducted by an historian of religions commissioned by the Government Commission on Swedish Democracy, and was published as a Statens Offentliga Utredningar (SOU, Government’s Official Reports) in 1999 (SOU 1999:9). It paints a far more complex picture than the first one and also comments on some relevant EU laws that have changed the basis for Swedish legislation. This includes laws designed to protect religious diversity and for example suggesting exemptions regarding pre-stunning and ritual slaughtering. It is rumoured that a change is on its way, but one must not underestimate the animal rights lobby that is both strong and influential.
 
Even though Sweden is an urbanised country and most farms are semi-industrial there are still a number of smaller farms. I know through personal information and through media that a few Muslim families have aligned themselves with farmers, buying and slaughtering animals at such farms. This is however done on a very small scale, only for personal use.

Clearly, importing meat butchered without pre-stunning is a cop-out — if you think it’s inhumane, you should not export the problem. Redefining kosher and halal slaughter to include the killing of unconscious animals is clever, but there doesn’t seem to have been much volunteering for this option (on the part of religious leaders, of course, not the animals). And driving religious rituals underground is hardly a long-term solution, and can lead to terrible press.

So, when human rights and animal rights clash, which should triumph?On another occasion, I might have brought Peter Singer into the debate at this point, and held forth at great length about how much of a distinction can be made between the suffering of humans and animals and how we should act towards animals as a result. Personally, I’m convinced we’ll all be vegetarians in 500 years time, but for now, I’ll take the steak and the blue pill. It’s an obvious question, but it is not the question I’m interested in right now. Instead, I want to know: In Sweden, is the invocation of animal rights considerations to limit traditional animal slaughter selective?

Exhibit A: Sámi school. What a cute website! Sámi children write in English about learning how to be good Sámi, including how to decapitate a reindeer. Not a stun gun in sight.

Exhibit B: Elk hunting, which according to this AFP news article on Sweden.se is “a ritual that is much more than a national pastime — hunting the elk is part of the Swedish identity.“Yes, the lure of the elk is powerful. So much so that authorities in northern Sweden have noticed a sharp, yet not entirely unexpected, increase in the number of fathers who take their mandatory paternity leave not just any old time, but precisely during hunting season.””

Taking a break for lunch, Tomas Rudenstam, a lawyer, checks his e-mail on his hand-held computer. But his thoughts are elsewhere, as he recalls the calf he knows he shot this morning but which darted away.
 
“Two yearlings and their mother appeared about 80 meters (yards) in front of me. I aimed at one of the yearlings and fired. I’m sure I wounded it,” says Tomas, who has already killed one other elk as the spruce twig in his cap testifies.

That elk is probably wishing it was being turned into a very halal kebab by now, rather than slowly bleeding to death in the forest somewhere.

The answer, then, is a resounding yes, Sweden does selectively apply animal rights considerations to limit traditional animal slaughter. These rituals are only barbaric, it turns out, if they’re practiced by non-indigenous Swedes with less clout than the animal rights lobby.

To remedy the situation, I propose the following: Either we pre-stun elk and have them lying around on the forest floor during hunting season so that when hunters find one they can humanely shoot it in the head, preserving “the spirit” of the hunt. If that is not acceptable, we should allow Muslims and Jews their own food rituals, unmitigated by this sudden selective concern for animal rights. To do anything else is to be culturally patronizing.

Best Swedish Weblog

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Sweden’s Internetworld has presided over what is becoming a recognized coming-of-age ritual in national blogging communities: In our case, it’s the first ever Best Swedish Weblog awards (article not online). Erik Stattin’s mymarkup.net, which happens to be my own favorite Swedish weblog, wins deservedly. In a sign that Swedish bloggers still have a lot to learn about the whole point of blogging, instead of sneering and backbiting at the results they heap praise on him! Me included! Help!

So, as a gesture of atonement for my lapse into positive thinking, I’d like to go on the record disagreeing with the other 4 choices. Oh, I read them all, and they are definitely in my top 20, but since we are talking pecking order, here is my numbers 2 to 5: Blind Höna, How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons, heartland.mine.nu and oh, alright, Jogin.com just this once, because he writes quite good English. For a Swede.

Swish Nobels

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The Volokh Conspiracy has a spirited defence going of Swiss creativity, for the most part successful, marred only by its dependence on dubious sources, namely the Swiss.

There seems to be a widely parroted perception that the Swiss have the most Nobel Prize winners on a per capita basis. But divide absolute totals for nationalities with CIA population estimates and you get 0.30 Swiss Nobel prize winners per 100,000 Swiss, whereas the Swedish manage 0.34 per 100,000 Swedes.

A breakdown of the categories shows the Swiss are fatally weak in Nobels for literature, trailing Sweden by 5. Perhaps writing in Swedish sometimes has its advantages.

(A note on my methodology: Data for nationalities seems to be up to date for 2002; neither the Swedes nor the Swiss won anything in 2003. And if it’s on the internet, it must be true, right?)

Sunday morning

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annavarld.jpg

My Statue of Liberty postcard went missing overnight, 3 days after I put it up. Any suggestions for the next step? I would of course never dream of pulling down the annan världsbild poster in retribution; that would be stooping to the same level and contradict the whole point of the exercise. Shall I try putting up a pro-WTO stickerI’m out of Statue of Liberty postcards.? Or shall I do a control experiment and put up something everybody agrees with, like End hunger now! just to check that it is really the content of my speech that is being objected to, not the delivery?

Interestingly, the ad for the real estate agent also disappeared. This leads me to believe that the censor must have had a small pang of conscience; something along the lines of: “Well, we really can’t let that misguided response continue to sit alongside the poster, but taking down just the postcard might look a bit too targeted, so I will also take down some of the ads to make it look like I did a regular clean-up of the bulletin board.”

In an apparently unrelated movevia Erik, via Manhus Beta., the Swedish chapter of Indymedia decided to start censoring contributed articles on its website as well as appended comments [Swedish]. The reason seems to be that articles were being posted [Swedish] criticizing the human rights abuses of regimes in the Middle East other that Israel. American Indymedia chapters, to their credit, are up in arms on the move by the Swedish chapter:

Readers say the editors have started to act like the fascists they claim to oppose, and to use tactics aimed to stymie free debate. Others have complained about the apparent racism of the editors, since censorship has been particularly harsh regarding comments or articles from specific ethnic groups.

Maybe the editors live in my building.

What is Sweden's murder rate?

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I’ve been sent an English translation of an official body-by-body investigationStrangely, the English translation is more detailed than the Swedish original conducted earlier this year into Sweden’s murder rate for 2002. The conclusion: “A total of 95 persons fell victim to incidents of lethal violence in Sweden in 2002.” For a population of 8.94 million at the end of 2002, that makes for a homicide rate of 1.07 per 100,000 people per year. Not 10 per 100,000, as The Economist reported, and lower than Japan’s rate of 1.10 per 100,000 in 2002.

The Economist used old Interpol data for 2001PDF thanks to Jan Haugland, which has since been “corrected”. The old Interpol data showed 892 murders in 2001 and a suspiciously exact rate of 10.01 per 100,000Could it have been a data entry error?; new data shows 167 murders that year, with a concomitant murder rate of 1.87 per 100,000. Interpol has not yet published 2002 data for Sweden.

That’s quite an improvement. But putting both PDFs — old and new — side by side raises many questions. The new data is clearly wrong when it comes to counting totals. Both PDFs count the total number of crimes committed in 2001 to be exactly 1,189,393. But the new data is now missing 622,232 instances of theft reported in the old data. In the new data, the total for category 4, all thefts, is lower than some of its subtotals! The old data also doesn’t add up, but not so flagrantly. What a mess.

Meanwhile, the Swedish report accounts for an overreporting of murders of around 60% over the last decade:

stats1.gif

This would reconcile Interpol’s own new rate of 1.87 in 2001, based on Swedish police statistics (red line), with the lower total of around 1.10 in 2002, based on a counting of actual bodies (blue line).

What we’re seeing, then, is a compounding of two errors. Interpol’s bizzare error, and then a systemic overreporting of murders in Sweden’s own police statistics.

From the chart it is clear that the divergence between the two lines becomes much larger starting in 1992. That’s when the police implemented a computerized case tracking system that was intended to solve cases, not give accurate crime figures, but from which statistics were culled nonetheless.

The result is overcounting. For example, murders committed abroad but reported in Sweden were counted. Conspiracies to commit murder that were not consumated but discovered were counted. Attempted murders were counted. Suspected murders that later proved to be accidents or suicides were counted. False murder reports were counted. Some murders were counted repeatedly:

One example of this phenomenon may be found in a case where there were two victims, but which was recorded as involving three victims; and where, in addition, the offence report was completed twice. This means that a total of six offences were registered, of which only two were correct. Furthermore, the two offences actually involved had been committed several years earlier.

Here is the breakdown in numbers:

numbers.gif

Quite a cautionary tale, then. But it’s probably too late to combat the frisson of excitement that coursed through the conservative web when The Economist‘s chart unwittingly endorsed Interpol’s error. A typical reaction, from the conservative American news site NewsMax:

Sweden, supposedly the land of granola-munching socialist peaceniks, had 10 murders for every 100,000 people. Yes, Sweden is branching out and is no longer just Suicide Central.

Maybe Stockholm will take a cue from our Second Amendment and allow its citizens the right to defend themselves from its out-of-control population of greasy-haired blond killers.

The moral: How nebulous statistics can be, and also how dangerous it can be to draw conclusions from improperly vetted data.

Swedish Chef

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chef.jpgI’ve been having far too much fun for the past half hour listening to the Muppets’ Swedish Chef over and over again. It’s on a newly launched site by the Swedish Institute called Young Swedes, and it’s bizarrely addictive.

Swedish chefs also feature on the parent site, Sweden.se, Sweden’s official “portal” on the web. This whole web presence is a huge branding exercise for Sweden, but the amount of information provided in the process is a bit staggering. If you have a term paper due tomorrow and haven’t started yet, you could do a lot worse than plagiarizing this site.

It’s fascinating how Swedes perceive themselves in the world, and then how they go about presenting themselves to the world.

Cookie, Monster?

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A comment left on this site a few days ago led me to the contributor’s blog, where I discovered an odd disclaimer: “In accordance with Swedish law I must inform you of cookies,” it begins. Impossible, I thought. Fear of cookies is so 1998. Surely no technologically savvy government, having read their primer on cookiesNo, really, read the primer., could possibly come up with a law so overbearing, given the target. But I was wrong. As of July this year, Swedish websites using cookies have to tell visitors this is the case. In addition, they have to explain to visitors how to turn off cookies in their browsers. Being out of the country, I completely missed this. Two bloggers noticed (that I found), but nobody made a fuss, and — now that I look for it — Swedish websites that use cookies do indeed carry warnings not entirely different in tone to those on cigarette packs in the US.

First off, I object to this law on esthetic grounds. How dare anyone tell me what text I should display on my website, thus ruining its clean, sparse linesI don’t use cookies at the moment, but I could well be if I were using one of many popular website traffic meters, and I am seriously considering doing so without telling you about it. In fact, maybe I just lied about my site’s cookie usage.. But more importantly, the internet is a public space, and in public places, you should expect to have your actions recorded as a unique but anonymous user. Next time you go to Stockholm’s NK department store, you will be observed by security cameras. Will anyone bother to ask you if that’s okay? I don’t think so.

The Swedish royal family agrees with me: Visit their official website and you’ll get two juicy, warning-free cookies deposited on your hard drive The cookies are called IntraComUserID and JSESSIONID.. Swedes with reluctant cookie warnings on their site are invited to jettison them and join their sovereign in his revolt.

Pop and Circumstance

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The view from my office is straight into the upper stories of Stockholm’s Royal palace, across the street. Nobody ever seems to be home, but the guards don’t let on. Today, in the courtyard behind the palace, the marching band assembled in a light drizzle and played some standards while I skirted some tourists on my way to lunch. Just before the band was out of earshot, a jolt of recognition: Super Trouper, by ABBA, in all its brassy splendor. Per. Fect.